While I strive to finish my own book on Artificial Intelligence - filling in what I consider to be about fifty perceptual gaps in current discussions,* I try to keep up with what's being said in a fast-changing landscape and ideascape. Take this widely bruited essay by Niall Ferguson in The Times, which begins with a nod to science fiction...
...asserting that ONLY my esteemed colleague, the brilliant Neal Stephenson, could possibly have peered ahead to see aspects of this era... despite there having been dozens of thoughtful or prophetic SF tales before Snow Crash (1992) and some pretty good ones after.
Not so much cyberpunk, which only occasionally tried for tech-accurate forecasting, instead of noir-inspired cynicism chic, substituting in Wintermute AI for the Illuminati or Mafia or SPECTRE....
... No, I'm thinking more of Stephenson and Greg Bear and Nancy Kress... and yeah, my own Earth (1990) and later Existence (2013), which speculated on not just one kind of AI, but dozens....
... as I will in my coming book, tentatively titled: Our Latest Children - Advice about – and for – our natural, AI and hybrid heirs.
*(especially gaps missed by the geniuses who are now making these systems.)
Anyway, here's one excerpt from Existence dealing with the topic. And ain't it a WAIST?
== WAIST ==
Wow, ain’t it strange that—boffins have been predicting that truly humanlike artificial intelligence oughta be “just a couple of decades away…” for eighty years already?
Some said AI would emerge from raw access to vast numbers of facts. That happened a few months after the Internet went public.
But ai never showed up.
Others looked for a network that finally had as many interconnections as a human brain, a milestone we saw passed in the teens, when some of the crimivirals—say the Ragnarok worm or the Tornado botnet—infested-hijacked enough homes and fones to constitute the world’s biggest distributed computer, far surpassing the greatest “supercomps” and even the number of synapses in your own skull!
Yet, still, ai waited.
How many other paths were tried? How about modeling a human brain in software?
Or modeling one in hardware.
Evolve one, in the great Darwinarium experiment!
Or try guiding evolution, altering computers and programs the way we did sheep and dogs, by letting only those reproduce that have traits we like—say, those that pass a Turing test, by seeming human.
Or the ones swarming the streets and homes and virts of Tokyo, selected to exude incredible cuteness?
Others, in a kind of mystical faith that was backed up by mathematics and hothouse physics, figured that a few hundred quantum processors, tuned just right, could connect with their counterparts in an infinite number of parallel worlds, and just-like-that, something marvelous and God-like would pop into being.
The one thing no one expected was for it to happen by accident, arising from a high school science fair experiment.
I mean, wow ain’t it strange that a half-brilliant tweak by sixteen-year-old Marguerita deSilva leaped past the accomplishments of every major laboratory, by uploading into cyberspace a perfect duplicate of the little mind, personality, and instincts of her pet rat, Porfirio?
And wow ain’t it strange that Porfirio proliferated, grabbing resources and expanding, in patterns and spirals that remain—to this day—so deeply and quintessentially ratlike?
Not evil, all-consuming, or even predatory—thank heavens. But insistent.
And Wow, AIST there is a worldwide betting pool, now totaling up to a billion Brazilian reals—over whether Marguerita will end up bankrupt, from all the lawsuits over lost data and computer cycles that have been gobbled up by Porfirio? Or else, if she’ll become the world’s richest person—because so many newer ais are based upon her patents? Or maybe because she alone seems to retain any sort of influence over Porfirio, luring his feral, brilliant attention into virtlayers and corners of the Worldspace where he can do little harm? So far.
And WAIST we are down to this? Propitiating a virtual Rat God—(you see, Porfirio, I remembered to capitalize your name, this time)—so that he’ll be patient and leave us alone. That is, until humans fully succeed where Viktor Frankenstein calamitously failed?
To duplicate the deSilva Result and provide her creation with a mate.
A few ideas distilled down in that excerpt? There are others.
But heck, have you seen that novel’s dramatic and fun 3-minute trailer? All hand-made art from the great Patrick Farley!
And while we’re on the topic: Here I read (aloud of course) chapter two of Existence, consisting of the stand alone story “Aficionado.”
BTW, in EXISTENCE I refer to the US Space Force. Not my biggest prediction, but another hit.
Now... off to the World SciFi Convention...
1 comment:
A virtual rat, fascinating. Possibly safer than a blue jay? Consider an app that can leverage underused neural processors in a few 100K smartphones, possibly one critical breakthrough in knowledge of neural architecture away.
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